Have you seen the movie The Matrix? If there’s one thing I got out of that movie, it’s that what we believe today may not be true.

Have you ever had a time in your life where you realized that something you believed for many years just wasn’t true? Or that, even though you believed something when you were younger, you have now taken a different perspective on that idea and it is almost contrary to what you believed before.

Does that change who you are?

Does that make you a bad person because you changed your mind?

Perhaps when you formed an opinion the first time, you didn’t have all the facts and years leater, you finally found a piece of the puzzle you didn’t eve know was missing, but it altered how you felt or how you looked at something.

How do we arrive at our opinions and beliefs anyway?

Aren’t they a culmination of things we hear, see, and read? (Don’t believe something just because it is in print.)

One of the biggest influences in how we form opinions based on little or no research is from what we hear our parents saying. If they say something is good, we want to believe it is good because we want to believe our parents. If they say something is bad, same thing. We do, too.

If we grew up hearing that “you can’t make a living in this world” what do you think you will end up believing? If you grew up hearing “money doesn’t grow on trees” do you think you’d believe it?

You may be saying to yourself, ” Just because someone else says something doesn’t influence how I think and what I believe in.”

Okay. I want you to try the following exercise. Everyday, three times a day for a month, I want you to look in the mirror and say the following:

I am an idiot.

I am worthless.

I am broke.

You don’t want to do it?

Why not?

You said that you weren’t influenced by what people said. Do you think that at the end of the 30 days, you might be a worthless, broke, idiot?

If you said yes, or feel that your self worth would have been taken down a notch, you have to admit that what others say, even what we say to ourselves, has an effect on minds.

Do you think that you might feel better about yourself if you said the following phrases three times a day for the next month?

How do we learn?

First is that there are four stages to learning.

What they don’t teach you in grade school

How to think

The basis for learning in our schools is based on rote memorization. We are not taught how to utilize the information we learn so that we can think and apply our knowledge in all areas of life.

How to learn

Nobody teaches you how to learn. Teachers just keep asking you to memorize pieces of information, with the hopes that one day you will be able to integrate it all and have usefull knowledge. The problem is that you are busy memorizing, and you have no relativity for why you are learning. Therefore, you don’t file this information in the right place. Then, when you do need it later in your life, you are not able to retrieve this knowledge.

Four levels of learning

In learning anything, we go through stages.

First, we look at the activity and say “I can do that.”Unconscious Incompetence = You don’t know that you don’t know!

Then we try to do it. That’s when we realize that we don’t know what we are doing, and we are probably in trouble in trying to perform the activity.Conscious Incompetence = You know that you don’t know!

THIS IS WHERE MOST ADULTS STOP WITH NEW ACTIVITIES!

As we continue to learn/practice/ rehearse the activity, we realize we can do it.Conscious Competence = You know that you know!

Then we reach a point where we are just doing it, and it is as natural as eating, driving a car, riding a bicycle, or any activity that we do just by habit, without thinking.Unconscious Competence = You don’t know you know!

At this stage you are doing things automatically. You have the knowledge to respond with a conditioned response — Like an Auto-Pilot response.

Learning

Learning can be simplified into two steps:

Being exposed to knowledge or information

Retrieving that knowledge

We say that “I learned that in high school.” We were exposed to that information in high school, but we also filed it somewhere we could retrieve the information on demand.

If you knew that an orange was a piece of fruit, but you didn’t know it was citrus, someone could ask you to name a citrus fruit, and you couldn’t name an orange — not because you didn’t know what an orange was, but because nobody gave you a cross-reference for retrieving that knowledge. Or the teacher may have given you the cross-reference information without any basis for teaching you this, so you elected not to keep it available as useful information.

Second is that there are two types of learners.

Learn more than one part of the puzzle at a time

When we are in grade school, we are taught to learn step one first completely. Then we can move on to step two, and learn that completely. We continue with learning each step one at a time until we have learned all the steps. Unless we consciously change this method of learning, we continue to use this method throughout our adulthood. This method can be called ‘stringer’ learning. (Success Magazine, 1980)

When you learned to put your first large jigsaw puzzle together, you were taught to put the outside edge together first, to build yourself a frame, or a base. Then you start putting small inside sections together until the puzzle is complete, and you can see the total picture. You didn’t start with the upper left corner and keep trying pieces until you got to the lower right corner, building it in a sequence. You jumped around and started to see pieces of the big picture until it finally all came together.

This method can be applied to learning, and is called ‘grouper’ learning. You create groups of knowledge, and then finally link them all together to create the big picture. Sometimes, you can get a good feel for the big picture before all the pieces are all in place.